PIX has been a theme-based photography initiative since 2011, poised to investigate and archive expansive fields of contemporary photography and writing practices in India and South Asia.

Focusing on a subcontinental zone that speaks to cross-cultural histories and traditions, over the last seven years, we have undertaken projects in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, and most recently, Myanmar, thereby engaging in a dialogue around photography with a transnational focus, and researching ways in which co-existing image-making practices are informed and evolve in relation to neighbouring regions.

With Photo Peshawar, we are pleased to announce an internationally distributed series through PIX Publishing (in association with Mapin Publishing), a new endeavour focusing on photography’s little-known histories emanating from the same geographic region. We believe that all imaging practices, and hence photography too, communicate in culturally specific ways. At the same time, given that it is a universally accessed form, we are also keen to recalibrate traditional dichotomies within the field such as high or low – innovative and reproductive – with the inclusion of marginalised vernacular models – subcultures of the medium that have been crucial for the circulation and scrutiny of the image in the present.

In an age of simultaneity and synchronicity, the power of the photograph – the moving image and the virtual – needs greater understanding and recognition in relation to all that is being swiftly transformed, and at times replaced – the analogue and the archive – in order to discover new lines of communication between past and present. PIX Publishing hopes to further investigate such circuits of exchange in the future.